Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

by Roger Luckhurst, Josephine McDonagh

Transactions and Encounters examines a diverse range of emerging technologies in the Victorian era. Such topics are explored as the popular craze for microscopes; the uncanny possibilities of the telephone; the jostling for authority between literature and science, with scenes by and including Dickens and Lewes, Huxley and Gosse; the weird imaginary around androgynous barnacles; and the competing versions of a mind-reading act. These essays combine to produce an invigorating and involving attempt to re-cast understandings of 19th century encounters between the cultural and scientific spheres.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2002

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.